“Crafting a Usable Past”: The Care-Centered Practice Narrative in Social Work

Abstract

Mary Richmond, Mary Jarrett, Jessie Taft, Virginia Robinson, and Bertha Reynolds were five eminent scholar-practitioners from the pre-World War II era who shaped American social work philosophy and practice. Telling their stories illuminates social work's care-centered core, resists pressure to demote compassion as a guiding value for the profession, and confronts the myth that practitioners have undermined the profession's “true” mission by abandoning social justice.